Foot Health, Brain Meaning and Seung Sahn
June 22, 2025
8 min read
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Newsletter
{Body}
Foot health
The way you stand — and consequently the way you walk, run, squat, reach, and bend — ultimately depends on the shape and strength of your feet and toes. This is basic biomechanics and physics: you derive your power and stability from where you make contact with the ground.
Yet feet are perhaps the most neglected area of the Western body. We overlook their critical importance in structuring our entire musculoskeletal system and rarely exercise or stretch them intentionally.
From this ignorance, we jam our feet into shoes that are too small, cushion them with inches of foam, and refuse to let them touch the Earth directly. We justify this with claims from podiatrists that padded shoes are not just beneficial but necessary for the body.
You don't need research papers to reject that claim outright (although studies now abound supporting barefoot movement). Our species — indeed, all species — have been shoeless since the dawn of time. Is it possible that millions of years of human evolution could be defeated by a relatively small team of engineers at Nike and New Balance? Highly unlikely.
Ancient tribes today still go barefoot, with some running dozens of miles daily without shoes, often maintaining this practice well into their 80s. Despite the many afflictions our ancestors endured—infections, broken bones, near-constant hunger—back pain appears to have been remarkably rare.*
Compare that reality with today's epidemic of plantar fasciitis, tight hamstrings, knee problems, and poor posture affecting hundreds of millions, and you'll reach an obvious conclusion: shoes aren't the wonder-cure we were led to believe.†
Of course, rejecting society's norms after decades of conditioning isn't easy, so don't feel insecure about letting your feet breathe. This discomfort fades with time, education, and good role models.‡
Next week, I'll dive deeper into the science of foot mechanics and natural movement.
*This is my strong belief, not an objective historical claim. 🙂
†I've been trying to convince my mom (who has two hip replacements) and best friend of this for five years now without much headway. Apparently we collectively have some thick attachments to these pieces of plastic on our feet.
‡Once in an Asheville grocery store, I saw a woman walking around barefoot. I approached her with excitement, confessing how I wished I had that same courage. Without a word, she made a brushing motion, blowing imaginary pixie dust toward me with a little "psh" sound. "There ya go," she said.
{Mind}
Do our brains make meaning?
Last week I described how words and images do not contain the meaning we see in them. They are the meaning.
If that’s the case, maybe the brain is like a vault wherein words and images are like keys that unlock pre-existing meanings stored in neural pathways?
Not quite.
It’s true that different brain structures mean we each have unique associations and responses to the same words (my conception of dog is slightly different from yours) but that doesn’t prove that the physical brain manufactures meaning. Rather, it simply demonstrates that meaning is immediate and present alongside thought-forms.
Put differently, meaning is not stored in your brain just as fire is not stored in wood. Fire IS what happens when wood burns. Meaning IS what happens when thoughts think. When you think "dog" and see a Golden Retriever while I see a German Shepherd, we're not accessing stored meanings — we're witnessing meaning expressing itself as a symbol or thought.
Thinking about the color purple means purpleness. Feeling sadness means sadness-ness. Reflecting on home means home-ness. Again, meaning is not thinking. Meaning is the essential knowing of what something is beyond the thought of what it is. I know that can sound confusing, but I promise it will soon make sense.
Let’s make this concrete by meditating together. Click below.
{Soul}
Is escaping one’s problems by using drugs, having thoughtless sex, or making money off of the suffering of others right or wrong? Well…they're not "wrong" in that they make one irredeemable. Nor are they "right" simply because they felt good or made sense to do in the moment.
Even so, all actions — even those executed from perfect ignorance — have karmic consequences. Cold-blooded murder may not put you outside of God's ever-present love, but it will fracture your psyche and sever its innate connection to peace.
Thus discerning between which actions preserve (or heal) the soul and which ones fragment it further is endlessly important. In determining what activities brings one closer to Rightness, ask yourself: Is this at all motivated by greed or hatred? Does doing so require me to betray something essential within myself? Would Jesus, Buddha or Krishna do it?
June 15, 2025
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